HTML5

We've blogged about MathML lots of times, so I'm sure I don't need to tell you why MathML is the way math should be written on the Web or why it is so important for accessibility. Instead, let me take this space to write about its history as a standard.

We will be showing our MathML editing tools at the Tekom conference in Stuttgart, Germany November 11-13, 2014. If you're a technical writer, documentation manager, content strategist, consultant or systems integrator you should know about MathFlow, especially if you're involved in structured XML content. We have tools that work with Oxygen, FrameMaker, Flare, XMetaL, Arbortext and Codex, to name a few. If you or any of your colleagues back at the office are working with any math content at all, visit us in Hall 1, stand 1/C02 to find out about MathFlow.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) creates and maintains most of the standards that make the World Wide Web work, including the most important one, HTML. They have just announced that HTML5 is a W3C Recommendation, which may sound a bit non-committal, but it is what the W3C calls their standards. Although the world has been hard at work implementing the HTML5 set of standards for years, and this event was pretty much a foregone conclusion, this is still very good news!

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news is that the new HTML5 standards initiative includes support for MathML and has been embraced by all browser vendors. This should reduce the barriers to producing web content with accessible, searchable, and interoperable mathematics.